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Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Fast!

I mentioned a few weeks back that I had ordered a larger hard disk that used a very large cache to get some of the benefits of SSD drives. And as some of the reviews pointed out, performance of a large cache disk drive improves over a period of days or more, as it learns which are the most commonly used parts of the actual hard disk, and leaves those preloaded in the cache.

The other big improvement was purchasing AVG PC Tuneup. There is no question in my mind that it cleaned up a lot of broken stuff in terms of registry entries and unused components. This six-year-old dual core laptop now screams!

5 comments:

For cleaning up your registry for free, I suggest CCleaner (http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner). I've used that for years with great results. It's also very smart at cleaning up your "temporary" files while maintaining your cookies.

I went the SSD route a few weeks ago. Now WORD and Firefox load as fast as apps do on my iPAD.

Additional benefits of an SSD are lowered power usage for increased battery life. There are no platters to spin or heads to move. Average access and latency are meaningless. Finally the laptop has significantly improved vibration resistance. This is important to me since I use this laptop for navigation on my sailboat.